50 Exciting Things You can Do with Alexa

The Amazon Echo, Amazon EchoDot and Amazon Tap let owners do hundreds of cool things using Alexa voice commands. Users can play music, listen to audio books, and get the news of the day to name a few popular ones. However, there are some lesser known Skills that may not jump to mind quickly. We looked at the long list of Skills and found the coolest 50 things you can do with Amazon your Echo, Tap or Dot. These also work on a newly updated Amazon Fire TV thanks to the voice feature in the remote control.

Using the Built-in Alexa Skills

Amazon keeps adding new third-party skills as developers create them, but they’re also adding built-in skills. These work for all Alexa users. Here’s list of the most useful built-in Alexa skills.

Set Alarms or Sleep Timers– Tell Alexa to “set an alarm for tomorrow at 7:00 a.m.” For a repeating alarm, say “Set a repeating alarm for weekdays at 7:00 a.m.” You can also tell Echo to turn off after 30 minutes of listening to music or a book by saying, “Set a sleep time for 30 minutes or 45 minutes.”

Read Kind Books – Say “read my Kindle book” and it reads the open book on your Kindle. “Read Red Storm Rising” prompts Alexa to read that book from your library using the same text to speech technology from the Kindle eReader. This also works with Audible audio books.

Find Local Businesses or Restaurants – “Find me a nearby Mexican restaurant” calls up search results via Yelp. If you need to find it later, just open the Alexa app on your phone or tablet and look at the recent interactions in what Amazon calls “cards”. The app shows reviews and further details. It also finds other business types.

Check Your Google Calendar – If you link your calendar in the Alexa app, you can have your device tell you what your appointments show for that day by saying Alexa, “what does May Day look like?”

Re-order Amazon Prime Items – If you regularly order things like toilet paper or bags of candy on Amazon Prime, tell Alexa “Order more Charmin” and it will place the order asking you for a voice code first.

Get Weather Conditions – Ask Alexa what the weather is like.

Ask Alexa what the weather is like. Open the app or go to the website to see a more detailed report like this in your Alexa Cards.

To find more, head over to the help page. Also, open the Alexa Cards and see all of your interactions with Alexa. Above, you’ll see a screen shot of the website’s detailed weather report.

How to Add Alexa Skills to Your Echo, Dot, Tap or Fire TV

Before using some of these Skills, the user will need to add them to their account so that the Skill works on their device. Open the Amazon Alexa app and tap on the menu button in the upper left corner of the app.

Tap on the menu button in the upper left corner of the Amazon Alexa app and then tap on Skills.

A menu slides in from the left side of the screen. Tap on Skills to open the Skills list. Each page lists ten Skills and the app shows over 60 pages of Skills. To narrow things down search the list of Skills using the search box at the top of the list. That’s the best way to find the Skills listed below.

Tap Enable to turn on an the Skill.

If you try out a Skill and don’t like it, tap on Disable and that turns it off so that Alexa won’t use it any more.

Use IFTTT With Alexa

Connect Alexa to IFTTT and use a large collection of cool IFTTT tasks.

Amazon and IFTTT got married. Now users can connect their Amazon Echo, Tap, Dot or Fire TV to IFTTT using Alexa. Head over to IFTTT and turn on the Alexa channel to get started. Once that’s done, start using IFTTT with Alexa to do a slew of cool things. Here’s a list of some of our favorites.

Add items to iOS or Android To Do lists or one of the other task list channels on IFTTT like Evernote, Wunderlist and more.

Find your phone using iOS Find My Phone or Android Device Manager.

Email your shopping list to yourself via Gmail.

Add songs played to a Google Spreadsheet.

What is Amazon Echo & What Can Alexa Do?

Stream Music From Spotify, Amazon Music, Pandora & More

Alexa can stream music from Spotify to the Echo, Echo Dot or a paired Bluetooth speaker. You can also stream Amazon Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio or TuneIn radio to the Echo using your voice.

Open the Alexa app and tap on the menu in the upper left. Tap on Settings and then on Music & Media. Tap on the account you want to use and then link to your account by logging into the account. You need to have Spotify Premium installed for this service to work with Spotify.

You can log into all the accounts you have and when you ask Alexa to play you can say "on Spotify" or on a different service to choose where to listen. On the bottom of this page, tap on Choose default music services to pick the service Alexa should use if you don't specify.